Arizona School Won't Use Textbooks

Some Guy writes "A high school in Vail will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans."

Comments

The Dog

[Valiss]

So now, when someone says, "The dog ate my homework," they'll actually mean, "The Dog virus ate my homework!"

What's wrong with textbooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the money is being spent on "tech in schools". At the end of the day, a bad teacher will be bad given a set of textbooks or laptops. Imo, this money should go towards more teacher training/more teachers.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[ConceptJunkie]

Imo, this money should go towards more teacher training/more teachers.

Yeah, but mindlessly pissing money down a hole has been touted as the way to fix education for so long, hardly anyone knows how to do anything else, even though it has never worked.

Hire good teachers. This requires paying a decent salary. Dismantle the teachers' unions, which serve only themselves and are largely responsible for the horrible mess our education system is in, by locking in bad teachers and bad ideas. Hold schools accountable by allowing vouchers, which will force competition.

Based on my experience as a volunteer teacher and feedback from kids, parents and other teachers, I'm pretty good at it. Kids like me and I like them (and I've got 4 of my own). We communicate well and the kids seem to both learn and have fun. I would love to teach professionally, but I can't afford the huge pay cut and I will never take a job that requires me to join a union.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[fm6]

All the money is being spent on "tech in schools"...

...is partly offset in this case by not buying all those overpriced textbooks.

Here's what's wrong with textbooks: they peddle an oversimplified, predigested, emasculated version of whatever they're trying to teach. You say the solution is better teachers? Good teachers hate textbooks. Good teachers know that the job is to teach student to do actual thinking -- a process not assisted by the unchallenging, anti-thought-provoking crap standard textbooks contain.

Teachers have been trying trying to find alternatives to textbooks for decades. Thirty-odd years ago, I had a really good high-school history class (20th century U.S.) where the teachers tossed out the textbooks and replaced them with all the serious reading they could legally photocopy. Nowadays, they would just point us at the Internet, and save a lot of time and money in the process.

Anyway, computers are an essential part of modern education. Aside from computer skills being a basic element of modern literacy, they just do a hell of lot to help with the process. If nothing else, they make writing a lot easier -- I mean jeez, no sane person does real writing by hand or typewriter any more. And writing is two thirds of a real education.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[UserChrisCanter4]

I am a member of a teacher's union. I hate 98% of what they stand for. But $130/year gets me $6 million in liability coverage. When some kid decides to sue for bad grades, sue for "mistreatment" while being taken to the disciplinary office, or accuse me of "touching them" because I failed them, I need that. It happens more frequently than a lot of people would care to imagine, especially the first example. So while I disagree with the teacher's union on a lot of things, I can't afford to take the chance. I'm going to have to have that same kind of coverage from the state before I give up my union membership.

Incidentally, union memebership is totally optional in most districts.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[lucifuge31337]

i'm convinced that most IT people don't understand the point of their job - provide service to their users so that their users can get their shit done. That means, if you have to research something you don't know (how to get Macs to connect to SMB shares) then get off your fat ass and find out how!!!! Then help your user!

Having gone through this at the grunt level as well as the management level, I can say that you are 110% correct. Most IT people, especially "paper mill" MCSE's really don't know whay they are . They often seem to think that the network/technology/whatever drives the business, rather than the other way around. With very few exceptions, that is obviously not the case, with their salaries easily in the "cost of doing business" category. This is eaxactly why so many non-techies have such a negative view of techs.

One of the worst examples I personally witnessed was an underling of mine who decided that the middle of the day, after he finished lunch, would be a good time to clean up the wiring closet. He felt no need to notify users, and seemed to not understand why this was a problem (at a web-based software development company, where 90% of the employees were testing code on machines that they damn well needed the network to get to).

And one more: A software developer at at a different job who I assigned to write a piece of software (almost....nothing more than an Access app) to assist in expediting a daily paperwork nightmare (ACH to/from several accounts....all source destination information already available electronically). I told him to go sit down with the girl who did it and lear how she does her job and exactly what she needed. His response was "I don't need to know how to do her job to write that." My response was, "See that door? Don't let it hit you in the ass on the way out."

Umm... vision?

[JossiRossi]

How many of us stare at a laptop screen for hours on end? How many of us realize how bad that is after a few days straight of doing it? LCD screens may not have the refresh rate issues, but still this can't bode well for the children's vision. Although optomitrists will likely be excited.

meanwhile, in kansas...

[avi33]

Plans are underway to do away with all science books except for one.

You've got to be kidding.

[pudding7]

400 high school kids running around with laptops?

My screen is broken
My battery died
My S key won't work
I dropped it
I lost it
I lost the cables
It won't turn on
I spilled soda on it
The wireless access point is down
The network is down
My wireless card broke
I can't log in
I forgot my password
I locked myself out
I deleted all my icons
Billy deleted all my icons

What an administration nightmare. Blah. Good luck with this little project.

My deepest fear: text changing on the fly

[Lead Butthead]

Imagin the power government will weld when they can change education text of our children on the fly to suit the preveiling views of the government.

Re:My deepest fear: text changing on the fly

[Meshach]

That is actually a very good point

Tin foil hat on

Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows that this is one of the hallmarks of a controlled society. As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost

Hat off

This is a good money saving idea. And it will save paper and make it easier to do homework from home

I am torn

Re:My deepest fear: text changing on the fly

[Jherek Carnelian]

Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows that this is one of the hallmarks of a controlled society.
As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost.

This is already happening, and it is indeed scary.
They just don't quite have the untraceable part down yet.

About a decade ago, Time Magazine published an essay by Bush Sr and Secretary of Defense Scowcroft on why they chose not take out Sadam during the first gulf war. A lot of the points they made have been proven true today.

Time DELETED the article from their online archives. It was as if it were never written, URLs that once worked are now road-kill on the information super-highway. Not only that, but significant changes were made to other articles in that same issues as compared to the print version.

Fortunately it wasn't quite so untraceable and has been widely reported (not widely enough IMNHO). Here is one take on the story, you can find plenty more by googling for bush scowcroft "reasons not to invade".

http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/hesket h.html

Alter-universe

[Dark Coder]

Top 10 things you're likely to hear shortly after the bell.

10. Canius Virii ate my homework.
9. Not now, I'm IM'ing with my broker
8. Press me and I'll press this button erasing your server
7. Road crew didn't blog their detours.
6. PDF Midterms -- Fresh off the teacher's home server, send $$ to PayPal.
5. Check out Mr. Crabapple's latest decline at RateMyTeacher.Com
4. Acrobat Reader is crashing... I couldn't bone up on it overnite.
3. Microsoft locked out PDF in favor of XML. Do you have an XML reader?
2. Not enough memstick-space
1. I can't read.

I've a bad feeling about this.

[Linker3000]

Why does my '25 years in IT' brain shudder at the prospect of this? In a nanosecond the following flashed through my consciousness:

Dropped it, flat batteries, can't see it in the sun, viruses, forgot to backup, stolen, central server outage, corrupt file, server cracked, can't type that fast, wifi down, wifi overloaded, forgot my password, not enough power sockets in the room, pulled off desk by someone tripping over power cable, broken keycaps, spilled drink on it, fighting for printer time, someone took my USB memory stick, unauthorised upgrade...I'm going pale at the thought!

Horrible Idea...

[John Seminal]

The laptops cost $850 each, and the district will hand them to 350 Empire High School students for the entire year. The fast-growing district hopes to have 750 students at the new high school eventually. A set of textbooks runs about $500 to $600, Baker said.

First, if the laptops are $850, don't also forget to add the tech support that will be required for each laptop. Will students be able to take the laptops home? What if one gets a virus, and infects the others. What if a few students decide to destroy all the laptops. In a wireless community, that can be done. Yet, it would be impossible to burn all the books.

Add to the list of concers, that Ferenhite 451 is comming. No more books. No more written records. Students will start using only computers, and trust the content as accurate. I can see in one years curriculum "we are going to war because of weapons of mass destruction". Next year the laptop says "we went to war to liberate a people from a ruthless dictator". If the first sentance was in the book, it could not be erased, and students would ask "what? why? how did it change?".

And what about lost laptops? What is a more attractive target to steal? Laptops or books? I know on college campuses, people try and steal books, to sell them back to the bookstore for $20. Now imagine something worth 10 times as much.

This is a bad idea for so many reasons. It will raise costs per student for the school to operate. Either students will have to pay, or the property tax will increase. Laptops are more vulnerable to 14-17 year olds for thieft and malicious viruses.

And how good is it for the eyes? Most of my friends who spend 6+ hours in front of a computer have bad eyes by the time they hit 25ish.

Racket!

[pin_gween]

In college they definitely are. Where I teach (NC), however, we don't buy books for a year (or worse, a semester) then try and get $3 at the end. We buy our books for 5 years. It is expensive as hell initially and when books are lost/destroyed. However, $65 for a book that lasts 5 years is not too much to expect taxpayers to pay.

Additionally, competition between publishers is fierce; thus textbook companies "comp" us extras like test banks, lcd projectors, informational cd's etc. I know the price of these freebies is inherent in the book cost, but...

It is a HELLUVA lot easier to get a kid to fork up $65 for a book than the $850 for laptops. What happens when someone steals the laptop? Not too many people look to jack you for a textbook.

What if they decide to keep the laptop for themselves? This is not a private school where the cost is absorbed in tuition, this taxpayer money. Add the cost of maintenance on the computers and I see this as a short lived experiment -- one dropped bookbag and you need another $850.

A local university tried this at one school in the district checked out 30 laptops to a class. Only half of them were returned and/or usable.

Re:Racket!

[Catbeller]

Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall. Steel is cheap. Mass production would drive costs down -- how many students are there? tens of millions.

Laptops are simply Microsoft and Intel's way of locking in customers forever. eBooks do not need a bloody laptop. I'd imagine the publishers love the new hardware DRM being built into the laptops' chipsets by Intel.

Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook? ... lawsuits from publishers?

Privacy concerns??

[John Seminal]

Those are all things that can go wrong with laptops, and I suppose it would be funny to hear a kid say he could not do his homework because "my S key did not work", or "the battery died". Just wait til one kid decides to sue because the flicker of the refreshment rate on his laptop monitor drove him insane or blind or caused him to not finish assignments on time.

But these laptops will belong to the school. And what is to stop the schools from monitoring what the students do. Keyloggers are cheap, can they be stuck inside the laptops? What about software monitors. Everytime you log into the school network for class, it downloads what you typed the night before, including the chat you had with your buddy about how you hate Mr. Teeths english lit class and want to stick a wad of dynamite up his ass and light it. Or worse, what if innocent Jenny, the schools love and joy was IM'ing with Johnson, the black no-no. Will teachers start looking at Jenny as a slut, worthless with no value? Can a teacher use this information to single out a student to expolit?

Who will own the content that is typed in the laptop. The school can claim they own the laptops. Unlike a paper notebook, that is mine and it would take a court order to look in it. Plus, it is not like mail, which is even more gaurded. I can see relationships between people breaking down as everyone is worried about saying the wrong thing.

My old highschool was in the newspaper last year. The decided to instal a new honor code policy, where students were expected to act a certain way on and off campus. That means if two kids get into a fight at the McDonalds, the school will get involved. When I was in school, the highschool did not give a rats ass what I did at 9pm, I was off grounds. What about laptops. How will this tie into the honor system?

an ebook sounds like a MUCH better solution.

[Vellmont]

The textbook replacement cries out for something like an ebook. Why? If designed right you'd get:

More rugged. Laptops have harddrives, keyboards, ports, etc. The more moving parts, and complexity the more likely it is to break. An ebook could eliminate all this via flash memory and touch screens. A gig of flash memory would likely be able to hold all the textbooks a kid would need for a year. Make it componentized so you could replace the touchscreen very easily.

Longer battery life. You really need very minimal processing power for an ebook, so you could use very low power processors. Battery lifetimes of 12-24 hours would be easy.

Lower OS complexity/OS access. If you make an ebook like an appliance and give the user only access to the core functions (no installing 3rd party apps for instance) then you solve all the problems of the OS being corrupted. Allow only data to be sent to/from the textbook.

Lower value to thieves. How many people really want an inexpensive ebook vs a laptop? If all you can do is read textbooks from it, it's a much smaller theft target.

What's the downside? Well the kids wouldn't be able to do homework on it. Big deal. They can't do homework on a printed textbook now.

The problem is the textbook publishers don't want to do it. For the most part they make money because textbooks wear out, not because the information in them needs changing/updating. How much has Calculus changed over the last 20 years? My guess is not at all. Science changes a little, maybe you'd need to update the information every 10 years (barring creationist lies). History textbooks probbably need more updating, but that's more due to changes in the political climate.

Students hate electronic books.

[bcrowell]

I've written some reasonably successful self-published physics textbooks. They're free in digital form (see my /. user page), and I also sell them in print.

My experience is that students hate electronic books. Of my own community college students, about 75% buy them in the bookstore for convenience, while the other 25% download them and print them out (saves a small amount of money, but it's a hassle, and the finished product isn't very nice). The percentage of students who don't use a hardcopy is zero. True, some might do it if they were forced to carry a laptop around, but that just begs the question of why anyone would want to force students to carry laptops around -- dopey idea, IMO.

The same seems to be true at other schools that use my books. I just recently had a student at another school order some books directly from me, and she mentioned that she was very upset at her school's bookstore for not stocking enough. She had been working from the downloads, but that's not what she wanted.

Coincidentally, there's a neighborhood grade school near me (not the one my kids go to) that provides laptops to some of their students, and soon is going to make it universal. My perception is that it's purely a PR thing to impress gullible parents with how high-tech the school is. (It's in a new development where a house with no yard goes for $600,000 --- I'm glad we bought a house in this town before the real estate craziness happened!)